This week, early voters in Georgia and Texas have been facing exceedingly long lines to cast their ballots due to reduced polling places and technological issues. Others, 81.1 million in fact, have requested mail-in ballots for this year’s election as a safer option to voting in person during the pandemic. But the hurdles for Native American voters are exponentially worse. As reported in August by NPQ, the Navajo Nation had one of the worst coronavirus outbreaks and highest infection rates in the country, which would make mail-in voting a safer choice for many, but according to a recent piece published by the Guardian, “Mail posted on the reservation has to travel as much as 244 miles farther than mail posted off-reservation” and “somevoters have to drive anywhere from 40 to 150 miles roundtrip to pick up their mail.” Lauren Bernally, an attorney with the Navajo Nation Human Rights Commission (NNHRC), recently stated, “Mail voting just does not work for the Navajo Nation.”
There are numerous systemic reasons why the current state of mail-in voting does not work for Native American voters. Beyond the sheer extra distance that mail must travel, O.J. Semans, Sr., a lawyer with Four Directions, a nationally renowned voting rights advocate for Native communities, found as part of the lawsuit Yazzie v. Hobbs that in Arizona, not only are there no 24/7 ballot drop-off boxes on Native lands, but there is just one early voting site for every 1,532 square miles, as compared to “the early voting location per 16.73 square miles in Scottsdale, Arizona, a community with three times as much wealth per household compared to Navajo Nation members. The disparity in early voting locations is extreme: the area on Navajo Nation is 9,158 percent that of the area per location in Scottsdale.”
Semans also notes there is “only one election day polling location per 306 square miles compared to one election day polling location per 2.9 square miles in Flagstaff, Arizona…the area on Navajo Nation is 10,554 percent that of the area per location in Flagstaff.”
Source: Nonprofit Quarterly; 10/15/20
